| Kettlewell's Experiment |
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Information AboutKettlewell's Experiment |
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THE EXPERIMENT During the late 1950s, Kettlewell began raising populations of light and dark peppered moths in his laboratory so he could perform his experiment. He marked all the moth with a drop of paint on the wing, so they could be recognized later. Next he released the light and dark moths in two separate wooded areas of England . One of the wooded areas was Birmingham wood, which is near the highly industrial city of Birmingham, which was heavily polluted. The other wooded area was Dorset wood, which was in a rural area that was not polluted. At the end of this, Kettlewell set traps around the woods to catch the moths and see which populations survived in the two different areas. The moths that matched the color of the tree trunks survived. This showed that in the polluted areas where the trees were darker the dark peppered moth survived, and in the Dorset wood where the trees were lighter, the light peppered moth survived. CONCLUSION Kettlewell concluded that the pollution from the factories in Birmingham caused Industrial Melanism , which darkened the color of the woods. This in turn caused the recessive trait of the peppered moth to be greatly expressed. So Kettlewell concluded that Natural Selection caused by industrial melanism caused the moth to adapt to their changing environment. REFERENCE Johnson and Raven, George B. and Peter H. ''Biology Pinciples and Exploration'', Austin: Holt, RineHart and Winston, 1997, 290-291. |
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